But the former energy minister in the Getty government has often been tempted to do just that, especially since Premier Ed Stelmach captured the Tory leadership in exactly the way Orman might have done it 14 years earlier.

If Orman had won in 1992, there would have been no Premier Ralph Klein, and Alberta would be a very different place today. “I do think about it sometimes,” he concedes, “although it doesn’t concern me too much because Ralph did such a great job.”

Now, at 63, he is giving it one more try. Whatever happens in the first party vote Sept. 17, there’s one mistake he won’t make again.

Orman finished third on the initial PC leadership ballot in 1992, with 15 per cent of the vote. He decided to drop out, he says, “because I just couldn’t see how in a week’s time we could make up the difference.”

In 2006, Orman was a media commentator when Stelmach, with the same percentage of first-ballot votes, stayed on for the second ballot.

By then, the leading camps of Jim Dinning and Ted Morton were at each other’s throats. They were so antagonistic that many backers threw second-choice support to Stelmach, the only alternative.

Orman now knows that if he’d stayed in the 1992 race, the same thing could have happened.

During the 1992 race, backers of Klein and Nancy Betkowski had come to despise each other just as much as the later followers of Dinning and Morton.

But he quit. This time, he’ll stick around as long as there’s a hope.

“That’s for sure,” he says. “I had a lot of calls from supporters after Ed won. We realize what could have happened if we’d stayed in. I guess I didn’t understand the model in 1992. But I’m in this race to win.”

In the six-person race to replace Stelmach, Orman’s opponents tend to dismiss him as yesterday’s man, a cabinet relic from Premier Don Getty’s day who has little relevance to modern Alberta.

But for Orman, his earlier experience is exactly the point. He believes the party has to return to the principles of the Tory founders before it can win the hearts of Albertans again.

“When the actions of government don’t go to the principles of the party, people say the government doesn’t reflect their views any more,” he says.

“It’s shown in the people who left to go to Wildrose — those people are actually quite principled. They believe the party must be the engine that drives caucus and government. I agree with them on that.”

Looking at the state of Alberta’s governing party, Orman feels the PCs decayed under Klein because the former premier’s personal popularity always carried the day.

But Stelmach didn’t have that clout, he says, and cabinet began to make unpopular decisions that deeply troubled MLAs and party members.

During this campaign, Orman has been sharply critical of the other candidates who now oppose the policies they voted for as Stelmach ministers.

A third-generation Calgarian, he was part of the early Peter Lougheed wave that swept into the legislature after the party’s first victory in 1971.

From 1972-75, at the urging of Lougheed’s friend, Jim Seymour, Orman was executive assistant to two energy ministers.

“I didn’t even know where the legislature was when it was suggested to me,” he says.

“But right from the start I loved the pace and the energy. You have to be a bit of a masochist in many ways. At first I had no idea what I was doing — we were all learning on the run.”

He then left government for 10 years to found and work in several energy-related companies. When Lougheed announced his resignation, Orman chaired Getty’s Calgary leadership campaign in 1985.

After Orman won the riding of Calgary-Montrose in the subsequent election, the new premier gave him three cabinet jobs of increasing importance: career development and employment, labour, and then energy.

Today, Getty backs Doug Horner, whose father, Doc Horner, was a close friend. But he still has fond memories of Orman.

“He had great talent and he was able to express the government’s viewpoint very well,” says Getty. “He was also very loyal and trustworthy.

“You have to have that pulling together to achieve things. I think it very much comes from his athletic background as a team person.”

Getty and Orman shared football — the premier as the famous former quarterback of the Edmonton Eskimos, Orman as a scholarship wide receiver with Eastern Washington University.

As labour minister, Orman implemented a new code that was controversial with unions. After spending two years thrashing it out in caucus, Getty was determined not to open the legislation to changes. He made that clear to Orman.

“And then, right after getting the job, I got a call from a reporter,” Orman recalls with a laugh.

“She asked me if I’d consider changes and I guess I said I might, under some circumstances.

“The next day, the headline said something like ‘Orman considers changes to labour bill.’ I caught it from everybody. I think I went into hiding for about two weeks.”

In energy, Orman oversaw expansion of pipelines into the United States. He personally fought California’s demands for deep discounts on natural gas, to the point that he later testified in a lawsuit brought by consumers against state regulators.

“In some of those days, energy could be kind of sleepy,” Getty recalls, “but on others it was nose-to-nose with Ottawa. Rick was good. He was tough.”

Despite his support for Horner, the ex-premier doesn’t count Orman out. “He’s very well financed from the wealthy oil industry wing of our party and he knows how to make an issue relevant to the public.”

Orman is proud of his oil and gas connections. “If don’t have the support of the industry,” he says, “I shouldn’t be a candidate at all.”

Orman grew up in Sunnyside. When he finished at Crescent Heights High, he says, “my family became the first one to have three generations graduate.”

Earlier, his father had been a pressman at the Calgary Herald. He quit the day Rick was born to go into the oil industry.

Today, Orman has loyal support from childhood friends, including Lee Richardson, the Calgary Centre MP who also worked with Orman at the legislature.

“He’s just a steady guy who gets things done,” Richardson says. “I’m kind of proud of him coming back. He certainly doesn’t need a job, but he feels things need to be done and he has something to contribute.”

Pat Nelson, Klein’s former treasurer, has known Orman since high school. “He’s a great friend,” she says. “We can go a year without seeing each other and when we meet, we’re right back in the old neighbourhood.”

Orman also enjoys support from Al Craig, his first deputy minister in career development and employment.

“He was a very good minister, always on top of things,” says Craig, who retired from government in 1996. “I wasn’t involved in politics then, of course. But I’ve been out of that business for a long while and I’m pleased to support him.”

Orman says he’s proud of his three children and two stepchildren from two marriages. He and his wife, Susan, spend as much time as possible with their three grandchildren.

Although he’s still involved in oil and gas, he likes to golf and ski and much as possible.

But Orman sincerely hopes that after the leadership voting is done, he’ll no longer have the time.

Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald.

dbraid@CalgaryHerald.com

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